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Constitutional Theocracy - A close-up

The book explores the world of constitutional theocracies through six different lenses.First, I define constitutional theocracy and describe its basic tenets, functioning, and intrinsic existential tensions. These embedded disharmonies pose...

Ran Hirschl

The Idea of Galicia - In a nutshell

This is a book about a geopolitical space—Galicia—that existed for a very precisely limited historical epoch.Galicia was created—I would say “invented”—in 1772 at the time of the partitions of Poland,...

Larry Wolff

Animus - A close-up

If a just-browsing reader were to open the book I would like them to begin reading the Introduction. The Introduction seeks to explain why the animus concept is so important,...

William D. Araiza

Hinduism Before Reform - The wide angle

Typically, the origins of modern Hinduism are traced to a single place, a decisive moment, and a compelling religious figure. The place is Bengal or, to be more specific, Calcutta....

Brian A. Hatcher

Copy This Book! What Data Tells Us about Copyright and the Public Good - In a nutshell

Our earliest attitudes about copyright law are probably formed by elementary school teachers admonishing us not to copy. Seeing little Johnny and Suzy sent to the principal’s office for plagiarism...

Paul J. Heald

Picturing American Modernity - In a nutshell

Picturing American Modernity is about how the early American cinema represented major changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the early twentieth century, particularly changes that were...

Kristen Whissel

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives - In a nutshell

I begin with the fact that, along with the United States, no country was more important in the twentieth century than was the Soviet Union. And it may also be...

Stephen F. Cohen

Before Colonization - A close-up

Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...

Charles R. Butcher

Helen of Troy - A close-up

No one can write about Helen of Troy without thinking about the meaning of beauty.Consider the following statements about Helen’s beauty. Here is Guido delle Colonne writing in the thirteenth...

Laurie Maguire

The Coevolution - The wide angle

I am an engineer. I design and build things that never before existed (mostly software, these days). For most of my life, I thought these things were my personal creations,...

Edward Ashford Lee

Ad Women - The wide angle

Although books on advertising history examine representations of gender, advertising history is a gendered narrative reflecting mostly men’s rather than women’s experience in advertising. To retell the history of advertising,...

Juliann Sivulka

Painted Palaces - In a nutshell

Painted Palaces is essentially an argument against a tenacious idea in art history – that one day around 1500, artists woke up, threw off the oppression of religion, and invented...

Anne Dunlop

Fearless Women - In a nutshell

What if someone could commit you to an insane asylum for life with a simple signature? Or send your children to live with strangers? Or fire you from your job...

Elizabeth Cobbs

The Gnostic New Age - In a nutshell

In The Gnostic New Age, I tell the powerful story of how gnostic groups arose in the first century CE as countercultural religious innovators, offering people in antiquity a completely...

April D. DeConick

Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia - The wide angle

I wrote this book keeping in mind a number of audiences. Scholars of modernism who remain narrow in their scope and clearly need to understand it in a genuinely global...

Iftikhar Dadi

A History of America in 100 Maps - A close-up

The opening image of the book may take some readers by surprise: it does not include America at all because it was drawn before Europeans “discovered” the western hemisphere. After...

Susan Schulten

The Cuban Hustle - A close-up

I hope readers who encounter the book at a bookstore might flip to the back of the book and see the ingenious and creative projects Cubans are creating, even in...

Sujatha Fernandes

Morality's Muddy Waters - In a nutshell

Morality’s Muddy Waters, as the subtitle suggests, worries about ethical quandaries in recent American history. I like my history and morality muddy, so to speak. Rather than a dry philosophical...

George Cotkin

Global California - A close-up

Global California should be of interest to national, state and local government officials, corporate and trade union executives, officers and active members of non-governmental organizations, civic and religious leaders, the...

Abraham F. Lowenthal

A Kingdom of Stargazers - The wide angle

This is my first single-authored monograph and, as such, is a direct outgrowth of the dissertation that I defended from the University of Minnesota’s Department of History in 2005. In...

Michael A. Ryan

Science in Environmental Policymaking - The wide angle

I came to this subject with a longstanding interest in the role of scientists in US policymaking. Growing up as the daughter of a climate scientist, I gained early exposure...

Ann Campbell Keller

The Man in the Dog Park - A close-up

There are so many encounters, described in the book, which continue to affect me. Maybe the reader would stumble on one of them and see its poignancy.A strapping, homeless, youth...

Cathy A. Small

Made in America - In a nutshell

Made in America asks whether, how, and in what ways Americans of today are culturally and psychologically different from Americans of the past.The book reaches back to the nation’s colonial...

Claude S. Fischer

The Uses of Diversity - The wide angle

I came to this book through my decades-long engagement with issues at the intersection of race, science, law and justice. I began over thirty years ago by exploring sites of the legal management of identity. This led me into the arena of privacy law and the ways in which it serves as a principle for managing individual identity in the face of intrusive market force and state policies...

Jonathan Kahn

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores - The wide angle

What also ties the chapters together and makes a coherent narrative of six disparate stories is the widespread knowledge of and reliance on legal principles that had stood the test...

Elaine Forman Crane

Lost to the Collective - A close-up

Lost the Collective reconstructs the rituals that developed in response to suicides among members of the Bolshevik Party and demonstrates how these practices helped to promote a particular vision of...

Kenneth M. Pinnow

A Dream Interpreted within a Dream - The wide angle

While I was doing field research during the 1990s for an earlier book, Healthy Democracies, I came across a great deal of government and industry documents focused on the imperatives...

Elliot R. Wolfson

Isolationism - In a nutshell

This is the first book to tell the fascinating story of American isolationism across the full arc of U.S. history. The United States that we know today has dominated global...

Charles A. Kupchan

Crossing Hitler - In a nutshell

Crossing Hitler is a biography of Hans Litten, a German lawyer who devoted his legal practice to fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the late 1920s and 1930s, as...

Benjamin C. Hett

The Performance of Politics - The wide angle

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

Jeffrey C. Alexander

2134 Micro-Interviews